JC: We have with us on the line now Congressman Trey Gowdy and chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Hey, Trey, great to have you on the show.

TG: Congressman, we miss you, and thank you for having me on.

JC: Well, thank you so much for coming on. Now I’m going to play for you, I’m sure you expected this, the clip from Hillary Clinton yesterday when she was being interviewed on CNN by Brianna Keilar. So please play that clip.

BK: Facing a subpoena, deleted emails from them?

HRC: You know, you’re starting with so many assumptions that are, I’ve never had a subpoena.

JC: I’ve never had a subpoena, her words. Congressman Trey Gowdy, did Hillary Clinton lie yesterday?

TG: Well, she certainly had a subpoena. You know, when you lie, a lie suggests an intent to deceive. I can’t imagine whatever intent she could possibly have. I try not to use the word lie. I can certainly tell you this. It is a fact that there was a subpoena issued to her in March of 2015. But Congressman, it’s also a fact that there was a subpoena in existence from another Congressional committee far before that one. So there are two subpoenas. There are letters from Congress. And there’s a statutory obligation to her to preserve public records. So whether it’s a subpoena in place or whether it’s a statute in place, or whether it’s a Congressional investigation in place, you can’t delete and wipe out public records.

JC: Now Chairman Gowdy, I have the subpoena that your committee sent out, I have a copy of it, sitting in front of me from March of 2015. But you’re now telling me that there was another one prior to that?

TG: Oh, yes, sir. There was, think back right after Benghazi, Jason Chaffetz wrote a letter to Secretary Clinton, in fact, saying Congress has the right and the authority to investigate these attacks. That is tantamount to a ‘do not destroy’ request. And also keep in mind, Congress wrote her directly when she was Secretary of State and asked her specifically, do you ever use personal email. She never answered that question. She never said yes, she never said no. All right, fast forward. The Oversight Committee is looking into Benghazi. They issued a subpoena to the State Department to bring certain documents over to Congress so we can inspect them. It is that subpoena that ultimately led the State Department to give us the first eight emails we got from her.

JC: And when was that?

TG: We got them in August of…

JC: No, but when was that subpoena?

TG: 2013.

JC: 2013?

TG: Yes, sir.

JC: So she, all right, so, because she had this subpoena in March, 2015, and then you’re saying she had another one in 2013.

TG: There was another one to the State Department. In August of 2013, there were two subpoenas sent to the State Department, which are requests for documents. But as a result of that subpoena to the State Department, the State Department then produced to us her emails. So there is no way to claim that there was not some legal process directing that those emails be retained and ultimately produced, because they were.

JC: Yeah, because I’ve read that her trying to weasel out of this is, out of the lie, and I’m going to use that term, and I’m going to get back to it in a minute, but is that well, I thought that the question was whether I was under any subpoenas when the emails were deleted. And so obviously, she had subpoenas. I mean, there is no way that she didn’t have subpoenas. That’s without question. I’ve got them sitting in front of me. But you’re saying that also, there were subpoenas that covered the deletion of those emails?

TG: There are, there were subpoenas in place well before our committee ever existed.

CNN has also posted a story about this. As if there were not already enough Clinton scandals, here is another one to add to the heap.

Investors Business Daily reports on the latest e-mails requested and received by Judicial Watch, a government watch-dog organization. The title for this post is a shortening up of a line from Judicial Watch, by the way.

Excerpt:

History recorded that the White House’s United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice appeared a few days after the terrorist incident on a number of Sunday television news shows saying that attack, which killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, was provoked by an Internet video.

It was just a few Islamic hotheads, she suggested, who took a protest over the video too far. We were assured the violence was in no way connected to President Obama’s Libya policy.

Judicial Watch, however, has been combing through the emails and finds they tell a different story.

They indicate a cover-up occurred. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said the documents that keep piling up “show the Obama White House was behind the big lie, first promoted by Hillary Clinton, that an Internet video caused the Benghazi terrorist attack.”

“Top White House aide Ben Rhodes, Hillary Clinton, and many key Obama officials pushed others to tie the Internet video to the attacks,” he said.

“It is little wonder that Mrs. Clinton and the entire Obama administration have fought so hard to keep these documents from the American people. All evidence now points to Hillary Clinton, with the approval of the White House, as being the source of the Internet video lie.”

It was a lie that bloomed into a conspiracy. The new documents released to Judicial Watch show “the Obama administration engaged domestic and foreign Islamist groups and foreign nationals to push the Internet video narrative.”

It appears the White House even successfully recruited the Turkish government, or at least Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, to help spread the lie.

Another email, says Judicial Watch, “evidently from the Office of the Secretary of Defense” and sent to National Security Council spokesperson Bernadette Meehan and other top White House officials, “shows that the administration took no action to deploy military assets almost five hours after the attack began.”

This corroborates early and continued speculation that the men were left on their own to die.

Why would the administration want to spin this tragic incident in such a way? Why did it want to, in the words of White House operative Rhodes, “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video”?

Because, as Rhodes said, it did not want to admit the attack was part of “broader failure of policy.”

The administration knew the Benghazi attack was a terrorist act, but it couldn’t dare admit it because that would call into question the Obama policy and expose as a lie the president’s claim that Libya was a success.

The Washington Times writes that the State Department is now admitting that Hillary lied about her e-mail server not containing any classified information.

Excerpt:

The State Department on Wednesday conceded that two dozen of Hillary Clinton’s emails did contain classified information, a fact that could trigger a U.S. policy that authorizes the government to take control of her private server and sanitize the contents.

A former senior intelligence official told The Washington Times the policy also requires the government to check other Internet paths her secret information could have taken.

The procedures are spelled out by the National Security Agency’s special panel on controlling leaked secrets, called the Committee on National Security Systems. It published a policy, “Securing Data and Handling Spillage Events,” that fits Mrs. Clinton’s unauthorized private server kept at her home while she was secretary of state, according to the retired officer’s reading of the regulations.

Why would anyone think that she would make a good President? It seems to me that she made a poor decision (Libya invasion), lied to cover up her poor decision (Youtube video), and lied when she said that her e-mails did not contain classified information.

U.S. intervention in Libya and Egypt, undermining governments that were no threat to American interests, led to Islamic extremists taking over in Egypt and terrorist chaos in Libya, where the American ambassador was killed, along with three other Americans.

[…]In Europe, as in the Middle East, our foreign policy during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was to undermine our friends and cater to our enemies.

The famous “reset” in our foreign policy with Russia began with the Obama administration reneging on a pre-existing American commitment to supply defensive technology to shield Poland and the Czech Republic from missile attacks.

This left both countries vulnerable to pressures and threats from Russia — and left other countries elsewhere wondering how much they could rely on American promises.

Even after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Obama administration refused to let the Ukrainians have weapons with which to defend themselves.

[…][Obama and Clinton] both opposed the military “surge” in Iraq, under General David Petraeus, that defeated the terrorists there.

Even after the surge succeeded, Hillary Clinton was among those who fiercely denied initially that it had succeeded, and sought to discredit Gen. Petraeus, though eventually the evidence of the surge’s success became undeniable, even among those who had opposed it.

The truly historic catastrophe of American foreign policy — not only failing to stop Iran from going nuclear, but making it more difficult for Israel to stop them — was also something that happened on Hillary Clinton’s watch as secretary of state.

What the administration’s protracted and repeatedly extended negotiations with Iran accomplished was to allow Iran time to multiply, bury and reinforce its nuclear facilities, to the point where it was uncertain whether Israel still had the military capacity to destroy those facilities.

There are no offsetting foreign policy triumphs under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Syria, China and North Korea are other scenes of similar setbacks.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, news has now come out that the Benghazi investigation has managed to get hold of e-mails that Hillary Clinton sent to her non-State-Department-employee friend Sidney Blumenthal. They did NOT get the e-mails from Hillary, like they were supposed to. They got them from Sidney Blumenthal. Why didn’t Hillary hand over those work-related e-mails? You can read about that story in the Washington Times.

And more – Clinton approved of the release of one of the Benghazi terrorist attack suspects in 2012. She assured conservative Congressman Tom Cotton that the Benghazi suspect would be monitored by the Tunisians, so that he could do us no more harm. Well, he ended up in Mosul, Iraq, and was just killed by an airstrike in June 2015. You can read more about that story in The Weekly Standard.

Seriously… I would think that the Libya debacle alone would be enough to sink Hillary’s presidential hopes. When you add the Russian reset, Benghazi YouTube alibi, Libya, Egypt, Syria, the Clinton Foundation scandal, and so many other failures and mistakes, we’d be better off hiring a clown to be President than putting her in charge. She just isn’t qualified to the job. She just doesn’t take national security and foreign policy seriously. She is only interested in one thing: getting elected.

Former acting CIA director Michael Morell said he believes former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Homebrew email server was indeed compromised by foreign intelligence services.

Morell, who served as both deputy director and acting director of the CIA during his four year tenure (2010-2013) made the remark to radio host Hugh Hewitt Friday afternoon as he continued promoting his new book on America’s war on terror.

“As a professional matter, do you believe at least one, or perhaps many, foreign intelligence services have everything that went to and from that server?” Hewitt asked.

“So I think that foreign intelligence services, the good ones, have everything on any unclassified network that the government uses, whether that’s a private server or a public one,” Morell said. “They’re that good.”

“So that’s a yes?” Hewitt asked in affirmation.

“Yep,” Morell said.

Well, that’s a comforting thought. But look on the bright side: at least with the e-mails all deleted, we don’t have any evidence that Clinton committed treason with Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, etc. That’s a positive, right? Well, what do you care about more? Our national security, or Hillary Clinton getting elected President in 2016?

The Obama administration will soon find itself in court having to explain to federal judges why it never told anyone former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton used a secret email address, potentially spoiling dozens of open records requests, experts said Wednesday.

And Mrs. Clinton could face up to three years in prison per message if she is found to have broken her word and handled classified information on the secret account, one open records expert told The Washington Times.

The legal challenges have already begun, with The Associated Press filing a federal lawsuit saying the State Department has foiled five years’ worth of requests for Mrs. Clinton’s emails, but never told them or the court that she kept her own server — meaning that her emails weren’t being searched.

The article points out that because Clinton had a secret, personal e-mail server, it will be difficult to prove that she handled classified information unless someone on the other end of one the e-mails shows up.

The State Department itself could face sanctions for refusing to own up to the existence of Hillary’s personal e-mail server when processing Freedom of Information Act requests:

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, which for years has battled for access to State Department records, said they are already preparing to ask several federal courts to review whether the Obama administration was skirting the law by not including Mrs. Clinton’s email server in its searches for documents.

“We had hundreds of requests. The State Department knew from the beginning these records weren’t being searched, and no one told us about it, no one told the courts about it,” Mr. Fitton said.

[…]The Associated Press filed a lawsuit Wednesday that could test the limits of the government’s ability to go after emails. Despite five years of questions, the State Department never said it didn’t have control over Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the AP said, suggesting that officials were breaking the spirit of open records when they said they were conducting searches for records.

“State’s failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton’s governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP’s requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that FOIA requires,” the news organization said in its lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

The second way that Hillary Clinton could go to prison is described at Fox News:

A former Justice Department lawyer says Hillary Clinton, despite her claims that she broke no rules or laws, may have committed a violation in leaving the State Department without turning over all official emails and records.

Shannen Coffin, a senior lawyer under the George W. Bush administration, pointed to a “separation” form that he said officials are supposed to sign upon leaving the department.

His argument: If she signed the form, she probably gave a false statement and broke the law; if she didn’t, she ran afoul of department policy.

The form — OF109 — certifies that the person who signs it has turned over all “classified or administratively controlled” materials, as well as all “unclassified documents and papers” relating to official government business.

“Making a false statement in this context, knowingly and willfully — which I can’t imagine anything more knowing and willful than knowing you have 55,000 records sitting in your home — if you do that, it is a felony,” he told Fox News’ “The Kelly File.”

The form cites “criminal penalties” for knowingly falsifying or concealing information.

“Every employee at the State Department has to sign this little piece of paper when they leave,” Coffin said. And if Clinton did not sign that document, he added, “why not?”

Here’s the video:

National Review reports that the State Department spokeswoman declined to produce the form:

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki couldn’t tell reporters on Thursday if Hillary Clinton signed an official records form presented to all employees as they leave the department — a crucial question in determining whether the former Secretary of State committed a felony by failing to turn over government e-mail records.

[…]“A former DOJ attorney has asked if, under department policy, Secretary Clinton — like all officials here in this building, when they depart or separate from this office, has to sign something called a form OF-109,” a reporter asked Psaki on Thursday. “It’s a separation statement declaring that when you leave office, you turn over not just classified materials, but any documents for official purposes. Did she sign –”

“I think this has been asked,” Psaki interrupted. “It was more than two years ago. I don’t have an update on that specific question at this point.”

Here’s the video:

Select Committee chair Trey Gowdy is continuing his Benghazi investigation, and the chair of the National Security Subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ron DeSantis is thinking of starting his own investigation of Hillary.

HH: I want the audience to know Congressman DeSantis is a Harvard Law grad as well as a veteran of the Armed Services, and knows of which he speaks when it comes to national security. And I believe you were on the National Security Subcommittee of Government Oversight, are you not?

RD: I’m the chairman, Hugh, so this is right up our alley. And we’re definitely going to pursue the security aspect of this, because, and I think it’s been written up pretty well in some of the blogs, the State Department has been hacked before. And they have a lot of resources that they put into to maintaining the integrity of that system. If she used Google or Microsoft or one of those, they put in some resources, too. She set up her own system, and so the question is did she invest any of her personal resources to make sure that this had integrity and was not susceptible to being hacked? And those are answers that we’re going to find out.

HH: How are you going to go about pursuing that, Congressman DeSantis, because I know Trey Gowdy’s got the Select Committee. But their scope begins really with our invasion of Libya, or our intervention in Libya. And the scope of her breaking of official norms begins the day she enters into office if not before with this private email server.

RD: No doubt about it, and I think we’re going to defer for the Libya stuff to Chairman Gowdy. He’s been working on that. But I’m going to urge our chairman, Jason Chaffetz, to use the full committee and as well as my subcommittee to look at all of what she did for her four year period, because we need to know whether there was any type of compromise of sensitive military. You see, in the military, if you send something over unclassified channels that is classified, it does not matter whether somebody actually intercepted. You assume that there’s been a security breach, and you change your affairs accordingly. And I find it hard to believe that she would have had four years as Secretary of State and not discussed sensitive matters over that email. And I think the American people deserve answers to those questions.

Defense analyst Frank Gaffney says that there is no way that Hillary’s claim that she never sent or received classified information is true. So we have to wait for those investigations to find them, then we can hold her accountable.